Tier Balancing: Towards Dynamic Fairness over Underlying Causal FactorsDownload PDF

Published: 01 Feb 2023, Last Modified: 12 Mar 2024ICLR 2023 posterReaders: Everyone
Keywords: Algorithmic Fairness, Causality, Dynamic Modeling, Long-term Fairness
Abstract: The pursuit of long-term fairness involves the interplay between decision-making and the underlying data generating process. In this paper, through causal modeling with a directed acyclic graph (DAG) on the decision-distribution interplay, we investigate the possibility of achieving long-term fairness from a dynamic perspective. We propose Tier Balancing, a technically more challenging but more natural notion to achieve in the context of long-term, dynamic fairness analysis. Different from previous fairness notions that are defined purely on observed variables, our notion goes one step further, capturing behind-the-scenes situation changes on the unobserved latent causal factors that directly carry out the influence from the current decision to the future data distribution. Under the specified dynamics, we prove that in general one cannot achieve the long-term fairness goal only through one-step interventions. Furthermore, in the effort of approaching long-term fairness, we consider the mission of "getting closer to" the long-term fairness goal and present possibility and impossibility results accordingly.
Anonymous Url: I certify that there is no URL (e.g., github page) that could be used to find authors’ identity.
No Acknowledgement Section: I certify that there is no acknowledgement section in this submission for double blind review.
Code Of Ethics: I acknowledge that I and all co-authors of this work have read and commit to adhering to the ICLR Code of Ethics
Submission Guidelines: Yes
Please Choose The Closest Area That Your Submission Falls Into: Social Aspects of Machine Learning (eg, AI safety, fairness, privacy, interpretability, human-AI interaction, ethics)
TL;DR: We formulate and investigate a long-term fairness notion that captures decision-distribution interplay via a detailed modeling over both observed and latent causal factors.
Supplementary Material: zip
Community Implementations: [![CatalyzeX](/images/catalyzex_icon.svg) 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2301.08987/code)
13 Replies

Loading